Suspended  (1983 - Infocom)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
_________________________

Description

(From the instruction manual)

You are the Central Mentality on an advanced semi-automated planet. You were supposed to sleep - in limited cryogenic suspension - for the next 500 years, 20 miles beneath the surface of the planet, while the great Filtering Computers maintained all surface systems. But the computers have taken you out of suspension because something is terribly wrong: the weather has become brutal, food production is dangerously low, and the Transportation System is malfunctioning, causing unprecedented accidents and casualties. The planet is in chaos.

You are physically immobilized. But you have six robots at your disposal, and you must manipulate them strategically to bring the Filtering Computers back into balance. Each robot has a distinct perception of the world and offers you specific abilities - one offers you sight; a second, hearing; a third, access to information in the computer memory banks. Through the robots, you must save the planet from destruction.


Alternate Titles

"Suspension" -- Working title
"Suspended: INTERLOGIC Science Fiction" -- Tag-lined title
"Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare" -- Tag-lined title



Trivia

Suspended was named #58 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).


Suspended has a number of preset difficulty levels, increasing (or decreasing) the difficulty of the game as a whole. There was also a "custom" difficulty setting, which allowed you to manually set various parameters in the game. (At which turn do the earthquakes happen? At which turn does the coolant system fail? At which turn does the human troubleshooter-team arrive? What is the initial positions of the six robots? And so on.)

But, humorously, there was also a pre-set "Impossible" difficulty setting, and it lived up to its word - if you chose this setting, the sun explodes within the first few turns, dooming the entire planet. Infocom (jokingly) offered a reward to anyone who could complete the game on the Impossible setting. Needless to say, nobody ever won that contest.


(From The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.2 Spring 1984)

Some statistics about Suspended:

Apparent number of rooms (those seen by the player): 61
Number of rooms: 63 (for various arcane programming reasons, some locations are inaccessible to the player)
Number of different ways to die: 6 (this refers to you, the person in the cylinder, not the individual robots)
Number of words in vocabulary: 676
Number of takeable objects: 32
Contributed by Belboz  (6599) on 10.05.2000. -- edit trivia


The game originally shipped with a plastic mapboard of the facility and 5 vinal counters for the robots. Thus was to help you visulize where everybody was during the game.


---


Description from the packaging:

They said you would sleep for half a millennium- not an unreasonable length of time, considering you'd be in limited cryogenic suspension. Your body would rest frozen at the planet's nerve center, an underground complex twenty miles beneath the surface. Your brain, they told you, would be wired to a network of computers; your mind would continue to operate at a minimal level, overseeing maintenance of surface-side equilibrium. And you would not awake, so they promised, until your five hundred years had elapsed- barring of course, the most dire emergency.

Good morning.
In Suspended, you will strategically manipulate six robots. Each has a distinct perception of the world, and offers you specific abilities. For instance, one specializes in sight, a second in hearing, and a third in accessing information from computer memory banks. Through them, you will solve an intertwined myriad of realistic and original problems. Should you find yourself baffled by some of the more intricate puzzles, you may wish to consult the underground complex's built-in advisory peripheral for hints.

The first time you play Suspended will not be your last. It continually challenges you to hone your strategies and develop new ones, to explore new areas and interactions, and in so doing to improve your score each time you play. Ad even if you succeed in mastering the first level of play, an advanced second level waits in the program to test your mettle again and again. In fact, the game is so designed that you can alter conditions at will before starting, effectively allowing you to customize the game into a new kind of Suspended whenever you desire.

The Infocom difference- it's all in your head.
You'll sense the difference as soon as you boot up the disk. Leave your menus and joysticks behind for this one. Because from the first prompt on, you become part of a story, in control of where you go and what you do- yet unable to predict or control the course of events. Soon you become aware on an intelligence within your computer, talking to you through your inner psyche. Infocom's prose has begun to interface with the world's most powerful graphics technology- your imagination- to generate a rich environment alive with images and actions more vivid than anything you'll ever see on a screen. It's just the sort of experience that has led reviewers to describe Infocom's prose as being "far more graphic than any depiction yet achieved by an adventure with graphics" (Softalk).

In this world within your head, you'll encounter situations, puzzles, and multidimensional personalities the like of which you won't find elsewhere. And when you're in the Infocom dimension, unlike games where interaction is constituted of pat little repetitions of pre-programmed responses to your input, anything within the bounds of reason and the limits of your own imagination is within the realm of possibility.

Listed below is a brief look at the main ingredients of the Infocom difference. They're in every Infocom game- and you'll never find them together anywhere else.
For the fist time in computer gamesmanship, you can communicate freely in normal English. And, the computer will respond in kind.
The most complete vocabulary available, with plenty of nouns, verb commands, even prepositions and adjectives- so you don't have to grope for words or be limited in your actions, as you do in other games.
The world's most innovative situations, interactions, and logical puzzles, to challenge your mind and your imagination.

Graphics that are distinctively more realistic than tiny little dots on a screen, because they come through your imagination and 100% graphics-free Infocom prose.
Multiple Save feature lets you play whenever you want, for as long as you want without having to restart the program.

But discover the difference for yourself. You've got Suspended in your sights. Follow it up with Zork, the classic underground trilogy, Deadline, the first great mystery of the computer age, or Starcross, the mindbending science fiction odyssey. (And they're all compatible with a wide variety of personal computers, so tell your friends.)

Step up to Infocom. All words. No pictures. The secret reaches of your mind are beckoning. A whole new dimension is in there waiting for you.
Essential life-support mechanisms for cryogenically suspended persons: schematic of underground complex, robot tracking devices, documentation and disk included.




http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/suspended/trivia
